Watching Apocalypse

I remember going to a theater in Bellingham, WA, to watch the first showing of Mindwalk in our area when it came out in 1990. The theater was nearly empty.  I recognized the movie critic who wrote reviews for the Bellingham Herald as we were leaving the theater.  In his review he wrote something like it was slow, boring, and incomprehensible.  A waste of acting talent. 

I was personally very interested in the subject because I'd read Fritjof Capra's The Turning Point and The Tao of Physics as part of my studies in Buddhism that began back in the late sixties while I was in the Navy when I was introduced to it through The Way of Zen by Alan Watts.  I loved the movie, it was like being in one of my intimate conversations with a few good friends over coffee that would sometimes go on for hours. 

In relation to Liv Ulman's character and the ideas she represented, I'd been exposed to systems theory through my studies in ecology.  It became part of the way I think. The topic: In the Language of Ecology  on the Watching Apocalypse Message Board is dedicated to that way of thinking.  In the 80's, I'd employed those theories in creating my job as a systems analyst and strategic planning consultant, which I'd recently walked away from when I sat in that theater watching Liv and the others in their mindwalking because I did not agree with the outcome of my work.

It's kind of funny how we get off our paths and into the thorny  thickets of life. The only reason I did that work as a consultant in the first place was out of desperation to save a relationship with a woman I cared deeply about who was becoming fed up with a life that wasn't meeting up to what she felt was her promise.  That is, to live in her parent's well-to-do middle class style that had deeply conditioned her world view. Turns out the "radical" ideas of living I had were only a temporary, no longer amusing fling for her.

For my own self, for my spirit or whatever you want to try to name it, I discovered I couldn't save something by doing the opposite of what I feel is the right thing to do.  The goal of strategic planning is to make institutional organizations, like corporations, more effective in achieving their purpose. In the end, their purpose involves destroying the environment.  To serve that purpose, I discovered in the most existential of ways, I had to blind myself to what I am aware of in order to do what I was being paid to do. I was actually destroying something essential about my beingness in this world by doing that. Such are the little things that make up a life.

So Mindwalk was an important movie for me at another of those epiphanal periods in my life's journey.  In 1990 I was actually going through the final stages of another one of those rite of passage crisis I kept going through until finally I realized that doing the least harm in the way I live is probably the most I can personally do to help the biosphere and all the other living processes on this planet. And I cannot feel that I am apart from any of that, so doing harm to the planet is doing harm to myself.  It turns out there aren't many people who want to be involved in living that way, so that means learning to live alone.  Which I have.  rh